Art

ART COLLECTION SYNOPSIS

The permanent fine arts collection began as a reflection of collecting taste in the Panhandle-Plains region. The art collection is exhibited in seven (7) galleries devoted to: Southwestern American art; Texas art; H. D. Bugbee and Olive Vandruff; Frank Reaugh; Graphics (prints and drawings); Western American art; and Eastern American and European art. Decorative art objects are exhibited in the south art galleries.

Southwestern Gallery

Historic New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado art is the collection's strength with works by artists of territorial New Mexico; members the Taos Society of Artists; later Taos artists; Santa Fe colony founders; Los Cinco Pintores; and other Santa Fe modernists as well as Hispanic wood carvers and Puebloan painters represented.

Texas Gallery

The historic Texas collection is the most comprehensive in the state and is exhibited in the only permanent gallery in the state devoted to early Texas art. Texas impressionists and Regionalists are represented from Amarillo to Galveston, El Paso to Texarkana.

Frank Reaugh Gallery

As the Museum is the repository for materiel relating to Western artist Frank Reaugh (1860-1945), the dean of Texas painters, the over 1,000 Reaugh works of art in the collection are presented on a rotating basis in the Reaugh Gallery.

Bugbee Gallery

The museum houses some 3,000 works by Harold D. Bugbee (1900-1963), “the Charlie Russell of Texas,” and his wife, wildlife painter, Olive Vandruff (1908-2003), including a reconstruction of Bugbee's studio.

Graphics Gallery

PPHM's rapidly expanding prints and drawings collection is exhibited in the Graphics Gallery. Today, the Museum has one of the most comprehensive Regionalist print collections in the U.S.

Western American Gallery

Western easel paintings and illustrations by W. Herbert Dunton, Frank B. Hoffman, and N. C. Wyeth, and sculpture by contemporary Western artists, highlight the Museum’s Western art gallery.

Eastern American and European Gallery

European paintings and sculpture include British, French, Spanish, and an Italian Renaissance painting. The Hudson River School, American Barbizon and Impressionism, and genre and portrait painters, including two pendant limner portraits, comprise the Eastern American collection.

Decorative Arts

The decorative arts collections reflect the tastes of Texas Panhandle residents from the 1890s to the 1950s. Included are Chippendale and Hepplewhite-style furniture, Heywood-Wakefield furniture, Chinese export porcelain and other ceramics, 18th and 19th-century English silver, and 20th-century art glass by Lalique, Galle, and Tiffany.

Temporary Exhibitions

Temporary exhibitions use the PPHM collection or the region as a springboard, and emphasize the American West, the Southwest, and Texas before 1960.